Shelley Fralic: Commuting to work, all by myself

Driving is easier than using public transit, writes Shelley Fralic, and it’s always more enjoyable.

Photograph by: Les Bazso
, PNG

When I started working in downtown Vancouver at the Department of National Revenue, which is what the income tax department was called back in 1970, I took the trolley bus every day from the corner of 45th Avenue and Victoria Drive for the 45-minute ride to the corner of Georgia and Granville, and then walked the few blocks east on Georgia to the Thurlow office.

The bus ride was invariably uneventful: There were fewer commuters then, far less traffic, far more buses and not everyone who boarded at that time of day was a nutcase on the loose, or a mannerless moron or a mom with a turbo buggy full of groceries and sticky kids.

I commuted by bus for a few years, every day, but then I was 17 and didn’t know any better.

And then I bought a car. It was a 1950-ish Austin Cambridge and it cost $50 and there were holes in the floorboards, but every morning I would start it up, pick up two of my co-worker friends on the way downtown and park the little beauty in a gravel parking lot not far from my desk.

The cars got better, my career and my friends went elsewhere, my working hours grew longer, the children arrived, the affordable suburbs beckoned and the wisdom of taking the bus was an inconvenient truth lost to nostalgia.

My one-woman car commute became an ingrained part of my weekday.

When SkyTrain came along in 1985, I was living in New Westminster, and tried it for a week or so. I had to bus it to the nearest station, though, and iffy transit schedules coupled with the demands of two school-age children with varied before-and-after-class pursuits soon found me back in the driver’s seat.

I commuted by car to downtown Vancouver for more than 30 years, all through the guilt-laden entreaties and HOV lanes and the West Coast Express and billion-dollar transit infrastructure expansions foisted on my green consciousness courtesy of local transit authorities.

In this, I am not much different from the many Metro Vancouverites — indeed, Canadians — who commute alone in their cars every day, mostly to and from their workplaces between downtown cores and growing suburbs, a reality once again bolstered this week by the latest Statistics Canada census figures. Of the 2.1 million of us commuting to our jobs around Metro Vancouver in 2011, a majority — 66 per cent — took solitary drives, while just under 20 per cent used public transit.

I no longer commute, having worked from home for the past decade, but it’s not hard to figure out why we’re immovable, even though driving one’s own car to work alone is expensive, utterly selfish and decidedly anti-environmental.

For one thing, it’s easier to drive than take a bus or train. Especially when it’s raining, and you have to drop off the kids or pick up the dry cleaning. For another, you’re on your timetable and not the unreliable one tacked to a bus stop post. And then there’s the issue of transit availability, something of a frustrating farce for those in the eastern suburbs and south of the Fraser, where the growing populace is woefully under-served. And carpooling and jostling for space on overcrowded rolling stock mostly suck, no matter how much we like to pretend that it’s fun to share a car with co-workers who have just fallen out of bed or a bus with strangers who have left their manners and deodorant on the doorstep.

I did it for all the reasons above, but mostly for this one:

That daily commute was the most cherished part of my day, the hour or two I most looked forward to.

That’s because it was the only time I was utterly alone, away from the demands of family and career, the only place I could get lost in my own thoughts, make plans for the next day and relive the one that was almost over.

And if I had to commute again, I would be right there behind the wheel once again. All by myself.

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